From Kate of the ClimateSight blog comes this really awesome summary: The Real Story of Climategate. The whole thing is good, but I especially liked this part:

Skepticism is a worthy quality in science, but denial is not. A skeptic will only accept a claim given sufficient evidence, but a denier will cling to their beliefs regardless of evidence. They will relentlessly attack arguments that contradict their cause, using talking points that are full of misconceptions and well-known to be false, while blindly accepting any argument that seems to support their point of view. A skeptic is willing to change their mind. A denier is not.

An example of the kind of reflexive anti-Obamaism that I was talking about with my “roadside bomb” post is the ongoing Senate dispute over ratification of the New START nuclear arms treaty. I want to give credit to Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) for being willing to stand up to his own party leadership, in particular to Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ).

Senate ratification of New START (which would require a two-thirds vote, meaning 9 Republicans in the current congress, or 14 starting next year) is a no-brainer in terms of US security interests, according to Lugar. Three Republican senators on the Foreign Relations Committee voted in favor of New START on September 16: Lugar, as well as Bob Corker (R-TN) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA). Along with the Democrats on the committee, that gave the treaty a 14-4 vote for ratification.

Kyl’s reasons for trying to put the brakes on ratification since then are a little unclear to me. The Wikipedia article on New START describes Kyl as an “arms control skeptic” who wants to withhold Republican votes in favor of the treaty until Obama will pledge to make a sufficiently large federal investment in “modernizing” US nuclear weapons. An alternate explanation is that Kyl is simply executing the Republican game-plan of denying Obama any victories whatsoever by any means necessary. Obama wants New START (having campaigned on furthering bilateral arms control), so preventing him from getting it helps Republicans make the case that he’s a failure who doesn’t deserve re-election.

The problem, of course, is that these sorts of actions have consequences that go beyond party politics. Bilateral arms control is not just an Obama campaign pledge. It’s something that benefits the entire country (well, world), regardless of your politics. Without New START, we’re essentially rolling back the clock on mutual verification to the time before that ultra-liberal Ronald Reagan managed to get the then-Soviet Union to join us in taking real, meaningful steps toward improved nuclear security.

The bottom line is that the White House is no longer counting on Kyl to bring around his caucus and has reverted back to an earlier, second-track strategy to reach out to all the other GOP senators the administration thinks might vote “yes.”

“There’s a number that we need to get to get this passed. The question is, if Senator Kyl decides he is not able to support it now, whether a number of other Republicans would come on board and support the treaty,” one official said. “We believe that at the end of the day we will have made that so clear, the broader argument on the merits of treaty… can carry the day with enough Republican senators to get this passed.”

The treaty has the support of six secretaries of states, six secretaries of defense, six national security advisers and eight U.S. strategic commanders. No one in any of those categories opposes it.

Is anyone opposed? According to Richard Burt, who negotiated the first START treaty for President George H.W. Bush, “(T)here are only two governments in the world that wouldn’t like to see this treaty ratified: the government in Tehran and the government in North Korea.”

…In light of this, there should be little difficulty in mustering the two-thirds vote in the full Senate necessary for ratification. Right?

Wrong. John Kyl, of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, has evidently decided on a course of obstruction…

It appears as if some Republicans have decided that their stance is going to be to oppose everything that comes out of the Obama White House, period. There used to be a time when the nation’s security was put ahead of partisan politics, but evidently that time has passed for Kyl and his ilk.

“If Dick Lugar,” said John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”

I don’t know what the chances are that eight Senate Republicans will join Lugar to vote in favor of New START, but here’s hoping.

I want to talk about a metaphor that occurred to me recently, but before I do, I want to emphasize that it is just a metaphor. I realize that there is a huge difference between blowing up innocent people and endeavoring to keep unemployment rates high. But with that said, even if the actual implementations of the two strategies differ, the strategies themselves have some interesting similarities.

The strategies I’m referring to, if you haven’t figured it out already, are those of the post-war Sunni insurgency in Iraq and the post-2008 Republican party in the US. In each case there was a group that had been toppled from power and wanted very much to get that power back. In each case the “official” levers of power were unavailable. In Iraq, the Army had been defeated militarily and then disbanded, and de-Baathification had removed Sunnis from power throughout the new government. In the US, Republicans had lost the White House, and, following on the 2006 loss of the House, they now had also lost the Senate (though it took a while for the Senate majority to actually change hands).

In each case the newly out-of-power group couldn’t do much within the system. They couldn’t run things, couldn’t propose or pass legislation, and couldn’t build goodwill with the population by delivering things that make peoples’ lives better. But in each case they could, if they chose, prevent their newly empowered adversaries from succeeding in doing any of those things. And that’s exactly what they did.

In Iraq the Sunni insurgency launched an underground war, both upon the American occupiers and upon the Shiite majority. Their preferred method of attack was the IED, the roadside bomb that killed American servicemen and women in their humvees or turned hundreds of mostly-Shiite civilians at markets and mosques into bloody body parts. Their goal was not to defeat the invaders or the Shiite ruling regime directly. It was to make the country ungovernable, to make things as horrific and chaotic as they could, to upset their opponents’ apple cart as a necessary first step in the eventual reacquisition of their own power.

In the US, the newly dis-empowered Republican party adopted the (again, metaphorically) similar strategy of denying Obama and his Democratic allies any easy legislative victories. In that fight they didn’t have much to work with, but they did have one thing: the Senate filibuster. So they used it, and used it at a record pace, blocking votes on virtually everything, including not only Democrats’ legislative priorities, but also normally-routine appointments to judgeships and government agencies. As a result they were able to kill or substantially hinder nearly every part of Obama’s agenda. Even on the one big battle that they lost (healthcare reform), they managed to turn it into something of a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats, chewing up vast amounts of time and Obama’s political capital, with the resulting legislation being watered down significantly.

Today, with the Republican party having re-won the House in the 2010 elections, they have an opportunity to go further, setting off even more “roadside bombs” (legislatively speaking). Among the things they can do, if they’re willing to, is to fight tooth and nail to make sure the government doesn’t do anything that might reduce the unemployment rate. They might go as far as forcing a government shutdown, blocking spending and helping to nudge the country back into the recession it has slowly been creeping out of. They can try to pressure the Fed not to take any actions that might stimulate economic growth. By doing so, they can maximize their chances of retaking the White House in 2012. Of course, they will also be choosing a strategy that keeps the economy sluggish and unemployment rates high.

That’s the sense in which the Republican strategy feels to me like the Sunni insurgency: By engaging in economic sabotage, they are willing to hurt the people of their own country merely because it helps their own chances of future power. It amounts to putting party before country in a way that I find really repellent, and that I tend to believe would strike those on the opposite side of this debate (by which I mean, conservatives) as equally repellent, if they actually believed it was happening. Which I assume they don’t believe, or else they would not support the kind of leadership that would engage in it.

For months in 2009, conservatives debated amongst themselves about whether it’s acceptable to actively root against President Obama as he dealt with a variety of pressing emergencies. Led by Rush Limbaugh and others, the right generally seemed to agree that there was nothing wrong with rooting against our leaders’ success, even in a time of crisis.

But we’re talking about a significantly different dynamic now. This general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don’t improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don’t improve. We’ve gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure.

Paul Krugman:

Axis of depression and There will be blood. Again, with Krugman you know you’re going to get an unabashedly liberal take. But that doesn’t mean you get to dismiss his arguments out of hand. (Well, if you’re the type who accepts the Fox News propaganda at face value, I guess it does. But at least speaking for myself, I feel like I have an obligation to consider the arguments that Krugman makes, and figure out why he’s incorrect, if I want to believe he is.)

From the latter Krugman piece:

Right now, in particular, Republicans are blocking an extension of unemployment benefits – an action that will both cause immense hardship and drain purchasing power from an already sputtering economy. But there’s no point appealing to the better angels of their nature; America just doesn’t work that way anymore.

And opposition for the sake of opposition isn’t limited to economic policy. Politics, they used to tell us, stops at the water’s edge – but that was then.

These days, national security experts are tearing their hair out over the decision of Senate Republicans to block a desperately needed new strategic arms treaty. And everyone knows that these Republicans oppose the treaty, not because of legitimate objections, but simply because it’s an Obama administration initiative; if sabotaging the president endangers the nation, so be it.

So I know that tangible improvements in the economy are key to Obama’s re-election chances. And Douglas Hibbs knows that it’s key. And senior administration officials know that its key. So is it so unreasonable to think that Mitch McConnell and John Boehner may also know that it’s key? That rank and file Republicans know that it’s key? McConnell has clarified that his key goal in the Senate is to cause Barack Obama to lose in 2012 which if McConnell understands the situation correctly means doing everything in his power to reduce economic growth. Boehner has distanced himself from this theory, but many members of his caucus may agree with McConnell.

Which is just to say that specifically the White House needs to be prepared not just for rough political tactics from the opposition (what else is new?) but for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage.

It’s not a lie if you believe it. With a title like that, how could I not find it compelling? Chait falls into the “no, they wouldn’t intentionally sabotage the economy” camp:

Still, I think you have to be careful about making assumptions about motive like this. Establishing motive is always very hard to prove. What’s more, the notion of deliberate sabotage presumes a conscious awareness that doesn’t square with human psychology as I understand it. People are extraordinarily deft at making their principles — not just their stated principles, but their actual principles — comport with their interests. The old Upton Sinclair quote — “It is difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it” — has a lot of wisdom to it.

I don’t think many Republicans are actually trying to stop legislation that might help the economy recover because they know that a slow economy is their best route to regaining power. I think that when they’re in power, consequences like an economic slowdown or a collapsing industry seem very dire, and policies to prevent this are going to sound compelling. When you’re out of power, arguments against such policies are going to sound more compelling.

Forecasting 2012 and The liberal noise machine. Drum is my favorite political blogger. The thing I like most about his writing is that he retains an ability to make up his own mind, based on his own research, independent of what ideology might dictate. He seems largely immune to the “my side is always right, even when it’s wrong” mindset that plagues so much of our national discourse. Here’s his take on the “are they intentionally sabotaging or not?” question:

POSTSCRIPT: For what it’s worth, my own view isn’t that Republicans are consciously trying to sabotage the economy. Rather, I think it’s really easy to convince yourself of things that are in your own self-interest, and that’s mostly what they’ve done. A bad economy is in their self-interest, so they’ve convinced themselves that every possible policy to improve things is a bad idea.

I’m willing to believe that people like Chait and Drum are right: Republicans would not intentionally hurt the country in order to help their own electoral prospects. But that’s small comfort, given that I also believe that by deluding themselves as they have into believing that opposing everything Obama wants will be good for the country, they have talked themselves into a strategy that actually does harm the country in real ways. We have real problems that need to be addressed, and by reflexively opposing everything Obama proposes, they are preventing even those actions that might be agreeable to both sides from being taken.

What is happening to the party of Ronald Reagan? He embraced scientific understanding of the environment and pollution and was proud of his role in helping to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. That was smart policy and smart politics. Most important, unlike many who profess to be his followers, Reagan didn’t deny the existence of global environmental problems but instead found ways to address them.

I guess the thing that bothers me is this: the piece reads to me as deeply and intentionally deceptive, while being skillfully crafted to avoid saying anything verifiably untrue. The constant mixing of oil and gas as though the two situations are the same. The cherry picked and misleading comparisons. For example, “oil sands projects expanded so fast, they now provide North America with more oil than Saudi Arabia.” – Saudia Arabia has never been a large direct supplier of oil to North America – and so this is an irrelevant example intended to mislead someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the stats. Clifford Krauss knows perfectly well that CERA has always said that oil will be plentiful and moderately priced in the near future. There is nothing new about this in the last three years. He knows that their track record of prediction in the 2005-2008 oil shock was dreadful. But he says nothing to clue his readers into any of this context.

And whatever happened to at least nominal adherence to the rule of journalistic balance? There isn’t even one quote from anyone who would dissent from the cornucopian point of view peddled in the article.

I have no idea what motivates the New York Times to publish this kind of dishonest propaganda masquerading as journalism, but it is extremely unhelpful.

If you prefer your propaganda masquerading as journalism straight, with no filter, you can read the original article here: There Will Be Fuel. The CERA Staniford refers to is Cambridge Energy Research Associates, an energy consulting firm with close ties to the oil industry and a history of making rosy predictions about our plentiful-fuel future that then fail to come true.

The fact that a certain subset of Republican talking points can’t withstand an adult, informed, honest debate is exactly why I wish we had more incidents like the one that The Politico is trying to revise into an Obama ambush. Go ahead and have a British-style “question time” for Obama to stand up in front of congressional Republicans and take questions about the socialist nature of healthcare reform. Go ahead and call real climate scientists to your congressional hearing. Do it every week from now until November, 2012.

The economy of the 21st century will be based on an educated workforce. This will entail a familiarity with science and technology and the ability to recognize that peer-reviewed scientific work is a conspiracy. Employers will be looking for people to compete against foreign workers by having the skills to look online and find a Web site that tells them that entire fields of science are a hoax.

My latest man-crush is Stuart Staniford. He has a PhD in physics from UC Davis and is currently chief scientist for FireEye, a company that develops security software. As a hobby, though, he obsesses about longterm risks to humanity, and in his most-recent bloggy incarnation he writes Early Warning, which I just came across last week when Kevin Drum linked to it.

I don’t always do this when I come across a new blog, but in this case I’ve gone back to the beginning and am reading the whole thing in chronological order. It’s really good stuff. I enjoy following along as Staniford works his way through a problem; he’s logical, intelligent, and has a real knack for conveying the technical details of an issue in terms that neither overwhelm nor talk down to a non-technical reader.

Here’s one item I liked: The Elephant in the Room, in which he reviews the book of the same name. Staniford actually doesn’t think much of the book, but his comments on the subject itself are very cool:

When something is scary, people have an incentive to somehow avoid dealing with the facts, and a variety of creative strategies are available to them.

And in the alternative, if you commit yourself in some way to the idea that a particular risk is a big deal, (eg taking a public position, making career choices based on your assessment), you have a psychological incentive to deny evidence that maybe the problem is not so severe after all.

I think it’s these dueling incentives that create the structure we so often see around major global risks – one side is busy either ignoring the problem, or if that is no longer working, minimizing it, attacking the integrity of the proponents, etc. Meanwhile, the other side is at risk of exaggerating the seriousness of the problem, ignoring countervailing evidence or important context and of course attacking the integrity of the deniers. Both sides are often sincerely convinced of their own rightness (though there certainly can be scope for cynicism and deliberate dishonesty as well, and both sides will be very quick to point to the evidence for this on the other side, and very slow to examine it on their own side).

Staniford has a recent series of posts on the future of drought that were especially good. They basically concern his emotional and intellectual reactions to this graph:

It’s fascinating stuff. Staniford basically freaks out in response to seeing the graph and trying to wrap his head around what it means, then settles himself down and says, in effect, hey, I’m a scientist. I need to engage with this thing rationally. And then he does just that, and takes the reader along with him as he does his research and fits the pieces together. Highly recommended.

If a seven-part series of posts is too much of an investment, here’s a recent piece of Staniford’s that might pique the interest of this site’s readers in particular: A few election throughts.

What I see happening is this: the public is aware, rather inchoately, that things are going badly wrong and that the life they are accustomed to is under threat, but they have no idea what to do. The parties, by and large, have failed to diagnose the roots of the problem, and instead are reflexively proposing to relive their greatest hits of the past. Since the problems of the past are not the problems of the present, these approaches are not working. This is leading both parties into a cycle of over-promising what they can deliver, thus leading to bitter disappointment.

He goes on to detail just how it is that he sees the two major parties failing, and he doesn’t pull his punches. Like Jon Stewart talking to Rachel Maddow, the thing that strikes me the most, I think, is just how refreshing it is to read the take of someone who doesn’t feel the need to be throwing monkey poo at one side or the other, but is willing to stand back and say look: monkeys throwing poo.

Here are three videos that came through my newsreader in the past few hours. Taken together, they tell a little story, which I can summarize like this: It’s all good fun mocking stupid/misguided/delusional people. But when those people end up in positions of power it’s not so funny, because sometimes the limits of human foresight come back to bite us, and when kids’ lives are at stake we need to take this stuff seriously.

I leave the deeper meanings of this story up to the reader.

And now, on with the show!

From RT America (a Russian-government-sponsored news outlet that has been accused, according to Wikipedia, of providing a platform for conspiracy theorists), here’s an explanation of what was really going on with that sunset contrail over southern California the other day:

Next up, Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), who is currently campaigning to be appointed the new chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce:

Finally, the demolition of a 275-foot stack at the Ohio Edison Mad River Power Plant, complete with a group of assembled schoolchildren there to enjoy the spectacle, and to receive an unforgettable lesson in the importance of careful engineering:

Denialism is always fascinating – the bold-faced denial of facts that are fully in evidence and easily verifiable. It is a testament to the profound psychological effect that ideology can have on the human brain, and the mechanisms by which it is maintained. And before we wax too self-righteous as skeptics in this regard, we must always remember that we are all susceptible to these psychological mechanisms. We are all human. That is precisely why we need the rigorous, transparent, and self-critical process of science to sort through complex questions such as disease and immunity.

I’m stealing his conclusion here, but the whole thing is very much worth reading.

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a poll-driven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within — within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for “public education” in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president’s speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of anti-government rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. What had gone wrong? Who was responsible? What could we do to help the president deal with it?

I enjoyed reading Ganz’s piece, and I think there’s a kernel of truth in it. It may be that now that Obama has a Republican House to deal with, something closer to Obama the campaigner of 2008 will be able to emerge. Going back to the Hillary battles, Obama has always been the guy who played chess while the other side was playing checkers, staying two or three moves ahead, and despite the attempts to portray last night as a referendum on his presidency, the real referendum will be held two years from now.

I actually was pretty gratified by last night’s results. The House fell to the Republicans, true, but again, I think that’s probably a good thing in terms of the larger political picture going forward. Let’s stand John Boehner and an actually-having-to-legislate Republican House up alongside Barack Obama, and let the American people decide whose leadership they prefer.

The Senate remained in Democratic hands, not that that makes a whole lot of difference as long as the party out of power is willing to wield the filibuster like the legislative equivalent of a roadside bomb. But it was gratifying to see Tea Party candidates lose Senate races the Republicans could otherwise have won.

Out here in my state and local races, most of the things I was hoping for came to pass: Brown beat Whitman, Boxer beat Fiorina, and Proposition 23 failed. Locally, all the candidates I supported won, so three incumbents were returned to the Carpinteria City Council, and one incumbent and two newcomers were sent to the Carpinteria Valley Water District board, with all the winning candidates being people I supported.

For me, the big issue going forward is climate change. I strongly approve of the new branding rolled out recently by David Roberts: This fight isn’t going to be won by people who describe themselves as environmentalists. It’s going to be won by climate hawks. More specifically, it’s going to be won by people for whom this issue transcends left-right political ideology. It’s going to be won by Democrats and Republicans who recognize that climate change is real, that it is caused by humans, and that the fight against it will be the defining battle of our generation.

How do we get there? How do we get someone like shcb to come to that realization? I think it has to happen gradually, one brave act of intellectual honesty at a time, and with a steady, careful presentation of the facts. I think we need to engage in the struggle of ideas, but engage in a way that acknowledges the basic intelligence and good faith of those on the other side, and that recognizes that both sides have work to do in terms of getting past our petty differences and facing up to the challenge at hand.

Darrell Issa, the presumptive new chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, says he wants to put Michael Mann on the witness stand. I say, good. I realize that Congressional hearings are not a court of law, and that Issa will certainly stack the deck any way he can to make his “ClimageGate” charges seem more credible. But this isn’t the time to whine about the tilt of the battlefield. This is the time to strap on the armor, grab the weapons, and get to it. As Mike Roddy put it in a comment on the Dot Earth blog:

Bring it on, baby. I can’t wait to see televised hearings, showing people like Michael Mann and James Hansen pitted against Issa and Inhofe. Even the average American will be able to figure out who actually knows what he’s talking about if this happens.